Naquada

Some friends of ours are doing the Welsh 3000’s; Climbing the 14 peaks over 3000ft in North Wales in just two and a half days, They start on 31st May 2007.Thank you for visiting our fundraising page.

Andy, Cara and Geoff are looking for sponsorship as they are doing the climbs for charity to benefit Helen & Douglas House.

Helen Douglas House is a registered charity providing respite and end of life care for children and young adults with life-shortening conditions, as well as support and friendship for the whole family.

Helen & Douglas House recently featured in a BBC2 series called “The Children of Helen House” and is also celebrating its 25th anniversary this year (when Helen House opened in 1982, it was the first hospice for children. Douglas House was the first hospice for young adults when it opened in 2004).

The hospices are located close to where we all live and work and this charity is therefore particularly special to us, so please give generously.

You can donate to their climb through their JustGiving.com page. All money will go directly to Helen & Douglas House, it’s also faster and, if you are a UK taxpayer, an extra 28% in tax will be added to your gift at no cost to you: Please make sure you tick all the Gift Aid boxes, so your tax will be claimed back.

Many thanks for your support.

Technorati Tags: charity, climbing, helen & douglas house, just giving, north wales, sponsorship, welsh peaks

It looks like I’m off to Paris in May.. I’ve been nominated to attend the IBM Technical Leadership Exchange (TLE) conference in Disneyland Paris

One of IBM’s most prestigious and successful learning events, the 2007 Technical Leadership Exchange (TLE) is an invitation-only education, professional development and networking event for key technical and delivery leaders. This year’s theme, Imagine the Possibilities, focuses on the potential of integrating and leveraging the diverse expertise and skills of the TLE attendees to increase client value by developing and delivering innovative solutions.

Apparently as a leader within my organisation, I’m being asked to participate in a new initiative, Pass it on! A program that promotes continuous post-event sharing of TLE information, learning, mentoring, and networking with colleagues to support IBM’s objectives of excellence, innovation and growth.

There’s a huge website that I’m going to have to read through, so it’s all a bit daunting.. Especially given I’ve never attended a TLE, or up until a few weeks ago even knew what the TLE was.. But we’re going to be staying out in Paris after TLE for a few days to do some exploring..

..also an excellent opportunity to practise some more magic I think!!

Technorati Tags: disneyland, IBM, paris, technical leadership exchange, TLE

Despite what advertising says, Mac’s DO freeze.. well they either Freeze (mouse still moves, keyboard lights works, but the applications are dead as a doornail), Hang (the beach ball of death and nothing else), or actually Crash (kernel panic, smoke, fire, universe folds in on itself). All of which are to the normal user, annoying.

My Mac sometimes hangs, or freezes, I’m not entirely sure, which, or to be honest am bothered about which actual physical end the kernel ends up in, it’s annoying. I’ve tried a number of things to fix it. I at first thought that might be heated related. The Dual Processor G5 PPC sits at about 45-50 degrees, which I thought was running a bit hot, but having checked the insides, everything seems to be running just fine fan wise and cooling wise (including the sometimes weird fan control of OSX).

The inbuilt Disk First Aid of OSX is quite good, but the other week, after one of the numerous reboots, I decided to check the disks. I’m always very uncomfortable about rebooting the machine after a hang or freeze. The standard OSX disk utility reports some errors, and then in probably a worst nightmare situation said that the ‘drive repair had failed due to the underlying disk being unable to exit the application’, whatever that meant.

This of course started alarm bells in my head.. I did a search of the net and found a alternative disk repair and maintenance application called Diskwarrior. It apparently does a much better job at repairing disks than the standard OSX disk utility. So I ordered a copy (thankfully it runs on Intel and PPC macs, so would be handy for all the Macs I have).

When I got a bootable CD copy (you require the boxed bootable version to be able to repair startup disks), I starts the Mac, held down C to select the CD boot, and eventually got the Diskwarrior interface and CD boot Mac OSX. I ran the repair on the startup disk and it reported a number of serious errors in the structure and permissions on the drive, and after a good hour of chunking, presented me with the option of replacing the selected drive with a nice new repaired and optimsed copy.

It actually reported a few errors in the drive and applications structure that ‘..could cause OS instability‘ so I hoped that would be the end of my issues. To be fair, it’s done a fantastic job, and although my drive wasn’t completed toast, it claims to be able to salvage pretty knackered disks with ease. My freezing issues are still present though (admittedly on a lesser frequency though!), and I’m at a lost to understand why..

I don’t think it’s a higher power trying to convince me that I need to buy that 24 inch iMac, I think it’s definitely software related. The freezing does seem to be more graphics related though; moving application to other monitors, the genie effect on some applications, screen savers using quartz.. but that also could be just me looking for reasons..

I could also rebuild OSX, there’s nothing on my startup drive that can’t be easily recreated.. although I’m not sure where OSX keeps my mail store when I’m using the standard Mail application (I’d quite like to keep my old none gMail mail store)..

Half of me wants the new Intel Mac so I can start running my old windows applications again, half says I really don’t need a new Mac.. It’s time to bite the bullet soon I think given the death of the PPC versions of Mac with Adobe’s release of CS3 for universal binaries..

Technorati Tags: Apple, crash, disk, disks, diskwarrior, freezes, Mac, OSX, repair

We all have multiple machines, your work laptop, your home PC, your Mac, and you end up normally having to move stuff around between them. Although I don’t tend to move much stuff from my work Thinkpad to my Mac’s the idea of being able to replicate realtime between machines has always been interesting.

In 2005 Microsoft Acquired FolderShare, a provider of emerging space file synchronisation and remote access technology. FolderShare, now part of the Windows Live Service allows you to securely keep files synchronised between your devices, share files with friends or colleagues, and remotely download your files from any web browser.

All sounds good in theory, but I’ve tried various sync utilities before, and none have ever really worked very well.. They have either only supported Windows, or Mac support’s be terrible and lagging too far behind windows versions (in some cases the Mac and PC clients haven’t even been compatible!)

The architecture for FolderShare seems to be quite simple;

FolderShare consists of two components - My FolderShare and the FolderShare Satellite. ‘My FolderShare’ is the web site that you use to administrate, invite, and generally manage your account, The FolderShare satellite is the software you run on your PC or Mac to allow synchronisation between the devices you choose.

We tried a simple set-up between three of our machines within the IBM network. Each machine having a folder, and one inviting the other two to sync a folder. The result was quite interesting, a file dropped into the folder on any machine, appeared a few moments later (depending on size of course) on all the other machines. Since the satellite works in the background, the files silently moved over to the other machines after they were added to the folder.

Set-up is pretty simple as well.. sign up, define your folders, repeat for each folder on each device you want sync’ed, start syncing..

The mechanism seems to be peer to peer encrypted, although I’ve not done any extensive testing yet.. There is a limit of file size though, each file can be a maximum of 2gig at the moment, which would suffice for most files I guess..

Would I use this? between the Mac and PC, possibly not, between PC’s maybe.. Across the internet.. jury is out..

It seems like a neat idea, and being Microsoft, apparently ‘There is NO spyware or adware‘ within the package..

Technorati Tags: Apple, foldershare, geeking, Mac, pc, sync, syncronisation, technology, windows

I downloaded and used Parallels Desktop for Mac a while ago, and was very impressed with how well it worked on my intel Macs. Like a lot VM type software, Parallels uses the new Intel virtualisation functionality.

Basically, you can run windows (or another OS) and mac together, each in their own true (unlike VMware or Virtual PC type offerings) space. When I tested it with a standard Windows XP build, it seemed to fly (although you really want to make sure you have about 2 gig of ram). I put it onto the list of items to buy at some point, given I’ve almost completely removed Windows machines from my network.

What’s now very different, and very unique is Parallels Coherence support. Coherence is quote ‘..a groundbreaking feature that lets users run Windows applications without seeing Windows. When a user switches to Coherence mode, their Windows desktop disappears, leaving their Windows applications running directly on their Mac desktop. This is the first opportunity ever for Mac users to run Windows applications in an effectively native environment!’

Windows itself vanishes.. and you’re left with the applications running natively on the Mac Desktop, you can even drop Windows applications onto the mac dock, and treat them just as if they were windows applications. As you can see from the screen shot, that’s MSProject running on the Mac desktop next to iPhoto and Internet Explorer, just like it was a native Mac Application. It’s worth watching the video on the site to see just how funky this is!!!

Parallels have also added Transporter to the latest version. this allows you to convert an existing windows machine over to Parallels, or convert VMware and Virtual PC images into Parallels. The Transporter seems to be a Mac and PC application. You install it onto the machine to be ‘cloned’ run it. It then proceeds to clone the machine either via the network, or onto removable media in a Parallels compatible image.

The other excellent news for those wanting to go out and buy big new shiny PC’s running Vista, is that vista is supported not only under Apple’s Boot Camp but also under this version of Parallels, meaning you can have a Vista install running as applications on the mac, or as a full boot OS, or in a nice window.

Parallels seems to really fly, and looks like a great alternative to having Windows and Mac set ups, just for a few windows applications that are Mac ported, such as FLStudio and Acid Pro. Both these music applications may never hit a Windows release, but are bits of software I use(d) a lot before I decided to abandon Windows in favour of Mac OSX.

Lifehacker.com has a nice overview and video (with nasty music!) on the beta that was out last year… Windows seamlessly on your Mac Desktop.. Oh makes you feel dirty!!!

Technorati Tags: Apple, bootcamp, Coherence, geeking, Mac, operatingsystems, parallels, pc, technology, virtualisation, virtualmachines, vista, windows

It was a year ago this weekend that we headed down to Falmouth for a long weekend away. We went down to see Jeff McBride and Eugene Burger perform, and took in some of the sights round Cornwall as well.

A year ago last night we sat on the beach eating fish and chips in the rain, watching the fishermen cast their lines out into the dark water, looking forward to a good weekend away.

So this weekend we decided to go on a Fish and Chip excursion in Bournemouth. I only took the small Ixus 700, but I managed to get some nice shots, as well as having a lovely walk along the beach, skimming stones, and then Fish and Chips sat on the groyns.

We watched the sun go down over the aquarium before heading back to the car and home.

There’s something about Bournemouth out of season.. still quite warm.. slightly busy.. but with an air of quite relaxed and peaceful.

I did wish I’d have my Canon 350D for the shots of the fish crate that was washed up on the shore though, I think I didn’t do too bad a job on catching it though.

We came back tired, relaxed and sleepy..

Technorati Tags: beach, bournemouth, photography, sea, sunsets